And so it begins….

By: Bob Kellett | April 17th, 2008

And so it ends. With the Portland Timbers kicking off their 2008 USL First Division campaign Thursday evening against Puerto Rico at PGE Park, one of my favorite times of the year officially comes to a close. Call me a masochist (I’ve been called worse), but I love the training period leading up to the start of the season. Like the spring tulips and the scary arrival of the sailors during Rose Festival and the summer beerfest and the changing of the leaves in fall and the first gloomy week of winter, the Timbers preseason is part of the ebb and flow of my life in Portland. This will be my eighth season following the Timbers, nearly a quarter of my life. Each March and April follow a similar pattern. It is a reassuring pattern. It goes something like this.

It always starts with uncertainty. Am I really going to dedicate an ungodly number hours of my life to watching grown men in shorts kick a ball on plastic? Is the team going to wipe away the disappointments of years’ past? Are we even going to have enough players under contract to field a team? If the team disappeared would the local media even notice?

And then the signings come. Usually it begins with players coming back. They are announced in bunches. More times than not we celebrate their return because even if there are better players out there in this world, they are lads. They are our Portland Timbers.

The official news then dries up. Trialists are brought in, but no names are given. Some of us take a sneak at training sessions and we try to memorize their faces and hear their names being shouted so that we can rush home and dig up their identities on the Internet. Sometimes we are right. Often we are wrong. It doesn’t matter. These are the guys who are going to give us that extra edge we need to bring a trophy to the Rose City.

The exhibition matches begin and it forces us to go to places we usually never go. Milwaukie, Tualatin, Forest Grove…this is our education in the burbs. The quality of play often matches the quality of the landscape. It is rugged and ugly and beautiful because it is the Portland Timbers in action and we are Portland Timbers fans and we haven’t seen the Portland Timbers play in five months.

We see enough to put names with faces. We see enough to devise starting lineups and to know the pecking order of the depth chart. We see enough to worry whether we have enough quality at left back and whether our wings will be good enough to deliver us that trophy that we so desire. We see friends that we haven’t seen all winter. We stand next to them and catch up on their lives. Each year we are little older, a little grayer, a little fatter, but we are always the same. We are Portland Timbers fans.

The weeks seem like months. The club continues to hide information and we continue to discover it. They have the cheese, we are the mice, the maze is never that difficult. We learn about more players who are signed and our anxieties are soothed by names of athletes who have played in countries like New Zealand, Cote d’Ivoire, and Japan. We know not of their talents, but we know that they are going to be Portland Timbers and that is good enough. They are our lads.

The final week takes a year. We’ve seen the team take on local college kids. We’ve seen them play a pro team or two. We’ve read the painfully brief coverage in the Trib and we’ve heard the brief interview or two with the team’s boss. We sit at our desks all day hitting refresh on a message board, eagerly digesting any and all news. We can’t take it anymore.

It is time for the season to start. It is time for those friends we’ve stood by for years to gather again for 90 minutes, twenty or so times during the summer. During those 90 minutes we are one driven by a grown man carrying a chainsaw and doing backflips. All misery in the world is forgotten. All responsibilities are unimportant. The only thing that matters in on the pitch. The Portland Timbers. Our Portland Timbers.

Here’s to a memorable 2008 season. See you at the stadium.

Game and Season Previews

A Season in Preview (Oregonlive Timbers Blog)

Japanese Star’s Tour Ends in Portland (The Oregonian)

Timbers Start Season, Say Goodbye to Mascot (Portland State Vanguard)

A Bittersweet Timbers Opening Day (Dave Knows)

Interviews with our 2008 heroes (The 107 Report)

Timbers Preview (USL Soccer)

Puerto Rico Preview (USL Soccer)

The Pole Comes Down and Timber Jim Retires (Soccer City USA)

Puerto Rico @ Portland (Blue Sky Soccer)